SONGS aiming for the lucrative Radio 2 playlist have to be bland enough to offend no-one while remaining just about memorable. Here’s how to make your ditty dull enough to soar:
Include a reference to a mundane, everyday item such as pastry, toast or your brother’s knee. This makes your song relatable to people who like pastries, eat toast and have brothers with knees.
Do you pronounce the word love as ‘lurve’ or ‘luuurve’, even though you’re rhyming it with ‘above’, ‘like a glove’ and ‘Brighton and Hove’? Are there at least 73 repeated mentions of ‘love’ in two verses, four choruses and a bridge? You’re getting there.
Are most of your backing vocals ‘la la la’, which you’ve rhymed with ‘la la la’? Now nobody needs to learn the words to sing along. Steve Wright in the Afternoon will be delighted.
Is the melody unvaried enough for it to register as white noise? Can the whole song go through your Nan’s hearing aid without trouble, the same way her blended meals pass smoothly down her throat?
Is the track not quite fast enough to do CPR to? Imagine someone’s unconscious and you’re pumping their chest to the tempo of your song. Do they just about stay dead?
Have you included not just one key change but also a second to cover the cracks when you’re about to run out of tune again? You’ve just given Vernon Kay listeners the biggest sexual thrill since the day in 2011 when they got all the answers on PopMaster.
